Idea one: Captchas are to become pretty useless as a "is this a human" tactic soon. Maybe it already is, I don't know. What other things could we think off to prove someone is human? I was watching Lex Fridman and Max Tegmark and they were remarking on how Twitter using payment as a differentiator between human and bot is actually really good. And maybe the only way we can reliably determine if someone is a human or not right now. Just by the virtue that having thousands of bots doing something, that suddenly costs $5 per event will deter most attacks. Integrating online identification systems from various countries could be one tactic (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID that we use in Sweden to log in to basically any online service). New startup: Un-botable authentication as a service.
Idea two: Since captchas are useless, we'll be able to do bots that can do almost everything on the web. No need for writing automation scripts, headless browsers, regexp etc. Just feed real visual data from browser to GPT-4 (or MiniGPT-4 or similar). Give instructions like "You need to accomplish this task: Go to facebook.com and create a user account and be friends with 100 people and act like a human. Follow the instructions on the website.". Then let the bot figure out where to move the mouse and send click events, keyboard events etc. Obviously much slower than a scripted bot, but would be very hard to detect as a bot. Good for E2E testing also? New startup: WebGPT: Bots that can do any task on any website. TestGPT: E2E testing service. Just write test instructions like "Make sure the login works on /login" and you're done! And you thought flaky tests were a thing of the past... Would be kind of cool for UX testing also. "You are a 43 year old truck driver in Spain, please go to news.ycombinator.com and see how easy it is for you to register an account, log in, go to any news story and make a new comment. Report anything you think is confusing."
would it be a good things for captchas to be useless? Because in my career I've been a few times on the receiving end of spam attacks and various nastiness and it's nice to be able to integrate such a thing - as unpleasant as it is for the user - and solve the problem at hand.
if this disappears then spammers and the various botnets will have the upper hand again.
Just tried it with a simple 4 character one and it's bad at it, detects 1 or two characters correctly from the 4 if it outputs anything.
It's probably better with the "select the traffic lights" kind of captchas, but those are also already possible to solve with other image models too if I remember correctly.
